[lagonegirl]

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/05/what_state_prisoners_get_to_wo.html

OMG 

[pinehutch]

Things that I knew about: that the mass incarceration of people in the USA , particularly black men, has direct ties to/is an extension of slavery. Things I did not know: this specific shit about Louisiana HOLY FUCK this is evil.

[i-hate-you3000]

OH MY GOSH????

'Modern-Day Slavery': Many Southern States Have Prison Inmates Working in Governor's Mansions and Capitol Buildings - Human Trafficking Sear

When activist Sam Sinyangwe was awaiting a meeting with the governor’s office at the Louisiana state capitol building in Baton Rouge, he not

At Least Seven States Have Prison Inmates Working in Governors' Mansions and Capitol Buildings

The 13th Amendment provides a loophole that allows for the legality of unpaid prison labor, which is sometimes called "modern-day slavery."

[joy-haver]

Grew up next to Angola. It’s much worse than you think

[sisterreisaid]

I wonder how many people are imprisoned for weed

[kaccvcate]

I’m from Mississippi and it’s like this in my home town. Enslaved prisoners clean roadways, pick cotton, everything they’ve done since before slavery was supposedly ended. What they teach in schools is nothing but propaganda.

[asphodelimago]

Blue states aren’t blameless either.

This is officially public data now, so I can share the most fucked up thing I’ve seen in a year of government bureaucracy.

A lot of the folks fighting wildfires in California are convicts. It’s perfectly legal to coerce or force convicts to work in this state, so this backbreaking, dangerous, health-destroying work is… not being freely chosen.

(Here’s the failed constitutional amendment from 2024 which would have prohibited forced labor. https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_6,_Remove_Involuntary_Servitude_as_Punishment_for_Crime_Amendment_(2024) )

Last year, the legislature passed a bill which will increase these convicts’ pay - while actively fighting fires - from $1.00/hour to $7.25/hour.

This is such a crying, unexpected emergency that the Department of Corrections had to go to the legislature, hat in hand, to ask for money. Not to pay the wages - to pay for IT infrastructure, because no convict worker has ever made enough money for the IRS to bother taxing them.

No convict has ever made enough for the IRS to bother with. That agency famous for letting things slide. Obviously.

(Here’s the link to the PDF. It’s a PDF, fair warning. https://bcp.dof.ca.gov/2627/FY2627_ORG5225_BCP9101.pdf )

All our firefighters are underpaid and underprotected. But people are being forced into work that will give them cancer and destroy their lungs, for less than half of minimum wage - and less than half of minimum wage is such a drastic improvement that it’s breaking the bureaucracy.

That’s a special level of fucked up.

[spirit-of-science]

I would like to add that the incarcerated firefighters, once released, cannot get jobs as firefighters because of their record.

The state can force you to risk your life fighting wildfires. But once you’re released you’re not qualified to choose to be a firefighter. because now you have a record.

[armengoldira]

[lagonegirl]

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/05/what_state_prisoners_get_to_wo.html

OMG 

[pinehutch]

Things that I knew about: that the mass incarceration of people in the USA , particularly black men, has direct ties to/is an extension of slavery. Things I did not know: this specific shit about Louisiana HOLY FUCK this is evil.

[i-hate-you3000]

OH MY GOSH????

'Modern-Day Slavery': Many Southern States Have Prison Inmates Working in Governor's Mansions and Capitol Buildings - Human Trafficking Sear

When activist Sam Sinyangwe was awaiting a meeting with the governor’s office at the Louisiana state capitol building in Baton Rouge, he not

At Least Seven States Have Prison Inmates Working in Governors' Mansions and Capitol Buildings

The 13th Amendment provides a loophole that allows for the legality of unpaid prison labor, which is sometimes called "modern-day slavery."

[joy-haver]

Grew up next to Angola. It’s much worse than you think

[sisterreisaid]

I wonder how many people are imprisoned for weed

[kaccvcate]

I’m from Mississippi and it’s like this in my home town. Enslaved prisoners clean roadways, pick cotton, everything they’ve done since before slavery was supposedly ended. What they teach in schools is nothing but propaganda.

[asphodelimago]

Blue states aren't blameless either.

This is officially public data now, so I can share the most fucked up thing I've seen in a year of government bureaucracy.

A lot of the folks fighting wildfires in California are convicts. It's perfectly legal to coerce or force convicts to work in this state, so this backbreaking, dangerous, health-destroying work is... not being freely chosen.

(Here's the failed constitutional amendment from 2024 which would have prohibited forced labor. https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_6,_Remove_Involuntary_Servitude_as_Punishment_for_Crime_Amendment_(2024) )

Last year, the legislature passed a bill which will increase these convicts' pay - while actively fighting fires - from $1.00/hour to $7.25/hour.

This is such a crying, unexpected emergency that the Department of Corrections had to go to the legislature, hat in hand, to ask for money. Not to pay the wages - to pay for IT infrastructure, because no convict worker has ever made enough money for the IRS to bother taxing them.

No convict has ever made enough for the IRS to bother with. That agency famous for letting things slide. Obviously.

(Here's the link to the PDF. It's a PDF, fair warning. https://bcp.dof.ca.gov/2627/FY2627_ORG5225_BCP9101.pdf )

All our firefighters are underpaid and underprotected. But people are being forced into work that will give them cancer and destroy their lungs, for less than half of minimum wage - and less than half of minimum wage is such a drastic improvement that it's breaking the bureaucracy.

That's a special level of fucked up.

[insidestory1]

Living with a chronic illness means never having enough energy to get through all the basic, practical tasks you have to do in a day. Which means that every day there are more and more tasks which didn't get done and have to be carried over to the next day. Eventually the list becomes so long that you have to accept that many of the things on it will never get done, and you end up living with a kind of graveyard of undone tasks which you go through life trying to ignore because you're just not able to do anything about them.

[asphodelimago]

Yes. Ugh, and the guilt whenever you want to do anything for fun, because the tasks piling up really are essential and important, but you will go insane if your life is 100% illness and drudgery. The judgment of others who see you're not handling the basics of "adulting," who don't understand or believe that you are working as hard as you possibly can. The self-doubt about whether you really could be doing more. Feeling just a little gross and dirty all the time because you can't quite keep up, until it feels like a moral failing rather than a practical one - that you're not a struggling person, you're a gross person.

Hate it hate it hate it.

[topgunvolleyballscene]

how often are you getting a headache

daily

weekly

monthly

couple times a year

yearly or less

Voting ended onJul 23

[topgunvolleyballscene]

how often are you getting a tummy ache

daily

weekly

monthly

every couple months

yearly or less

Voting ended onJul 23

[topgunvolleyballscene]

Ok so thanks for voting on this but i need you to reblog it too

[topgunvolleyballscene]

how often are you getting a headache

daily

weekly

monthly

couple times a year

yearly or less

Voting ended onJul 23

[topgunvolleyballscene]

how often are you getting a tummy ache

daily

weekly

monthly

every couple months

yearly or less

Voting ended onJul 23

[topgunvolleyballscene]

Ok so thanks for voting on this but i need you to reblog it too

[artsekey]

Reading a book about the psychology of friendship (that, oh by the way, taps the ace and trans communities in its discussion not as clinical categories but by including anecdotes from people in those communities!!) and somehow it encouraged me to quadruple down on saying:

We literally do not have enough friendships. Our culture's obsession with romance over friendship is shockingly new (1850's on) and it is having a serious impact on our health across the board, specifically men. This problem has become sharply exacerbated in the last 20 years.

We need more friendships. We need more friendship in media. "But what if they kissed?" What if they didn't, and the love that was there mattered anyway??? Take my hand. Imagine this with me. A relationship unbound by law or expectation. People who choose one another again and again. To stay in each other's lives when there are no societal tethers holding them together.

Go read Platonic by Marisa G. Franco (PhD).

[asphodelimago]

... also like. This is not a refusal to engage with the point. But what if they did kiss.

What about gentle forehead kisses and cheek kisses.

What about courtly hand-kissing to say "we may have socially prescribed roles, but my affection for you is not simply a matter of duty; I would choose this no matter the social expectations."

What about smooching the top of your cat's head because they are just so cute and so beloved that it must be expressed through physical affection.

Because honestly like, I think the framing of all physical contact and affection as obviously romantic is also a reflection of how we prioritize romance over friendship, and it's kind of a microcosm that shows how true OP's point is.

People are social animals! Touch is a part of how we express our relationships! The fact that our society says you may only touch one person, and that must be specifically the person you're having sex with... That's fucked up.

That leads to a lot of lonely people, and I wish more friends and family felt able to be physically and emotionally close without censure or fear of being misunderstood. So often, society treats friendship as simply a prelude to romance, and anyone who wants non-romantic relationships is a slut or a fool or leading a man on.

We definitely need more friendships.

[ilookattextile]

Netflix doing a little house on the prairie remake is going to be so fascinating like how are they going to try to make that storyline woke. Just how…. ( i have an idea of how and i think it will involve laura ingalls befriending an indigenous girl her age or something in the style of anne with an e but it really won’t be able to reckon with the author of the book referring to “savages” all the time)

[ilookattextile]

I guessed it

[asphodelimago]

I also want to know how they're going to retcon "a couple months of really ill-advised squatting and ecological damage" into some kind of Great American Story.

Seriously, they were on the prairie for a couple of months. Even the fucking US military said they were in the wrong.

[nonbinary-wrath-month]

The common refrain of "transmascs will shit themselves when they realise that T is making them look like a man, not an androgynous femboy twink" has always bothered me for two reasons. The more minor reason is that "man (on T)" and "androgynous femboy twink" are pretty obviously not mutually exclusive categories. There are a ton of men (cis and trans) with normal T levels who are androgynes, femboys, and/or twinks. There are people who may not end up looking like that when they are on T, but it is still within the realm of possible outcomes, and if it's what one wants to look like, there are things one can do to get closer to one's goal.

The more major reason I am bothered by this refrain, though, is the fact that people who say "why do transmascs always want to look like androgynous femboy twinks?" use this demeaning tone that indicates they have a low opinion of transmascs, androgynous people, femboys, and twinks. It is said as if transmascs are too stupid to know even the basic facts of what they're doing with their bodies, and as if wanting to be an androgynous, feminine, or visibly queer man/masc is inherently a bad and absurd thing to desire. The principle of "some people say 'twink' when they really mean 'fag'" is on full display here. It becomes more obvious when it's paired with overt transmedicalism, e.g., "Why do these trender wannabe twinks feel the need to tell everybody that they're trans?", or "'Transmascs' who want to be feminine twinks are basically not even trans". I can only conclude from statements like these that they think being a "real man" means not being a feminine twink, and that it is unacceptable and undesirable (for a man/masc) to be visibly queer and/or GNC. Otherwise, this would not be said with such derision. Needless to say, it is not the hill pro-trans people should ever be dying on.

[asphodelimago]

"Twink" usually just means "conventionally attractive, young, and slim", anyway.

That's just regular beauty standards. Most people would like to fit their society's beauty standards.

My cis bro was more than a little heartbroken that he grew up to be 6'5", stocky, and bald, rather than looking like a kpop star. Every cis dude I know who goes bald has some serious feelings about it.

Transmascs are just getting judged for having the same dysphoria and complicated feelings cis folks have about being attractive, getting older, and how their true self fits with society's perception of them.

[podcastwizard]

LIKES TO CHARGE REBLOGS TO CAST

[the-goddess-of-annoying]

you people aren't CASTING

[the-goddess-of-annoying]

NO

[natalieironside]

I wonder to what extent cryptocurrency has contributed to the current inflation crisis. Like. We have this whole secondary economy where every day millions of extremely-low-confidence dollars are being converted into a deceptively-high-confidence commodity currency which is either hoarded without being spent or gets converted into more commodity currency. That's a nightmare scenario. That does really bad stuff to economies.

[fundamentalpowers]

A quick search indicates to me that over the past few years, several economic studies have shown that crypto has no real effect on inflation, in the context of studying whether crypto reserves can be used as a hedge against inflation.

I suspect that if there's a (merely) economic problem caused by crypto, it has to do with its status as a vehicle for wealth transfer from poor to rich by way of repeated rug-pulling, but that seems entirely divorced from inflation per se.

[chillgamesh-the-swing]

So the studies asking "could we use crypto to mitigate inflation" as in by turning us dollars into goblin money are we removing dollars from circulation. and they've have concluded that it doesn't because those dollars are still out there? and most people involved are just screwed when their goblin money evaporates and they've given away all their dollars to some disreputable wight?

I mean yeah that seems like important data to have, dunno that it indicates no role in having created the crisis though.

[fundamentalpowers]

No, if I understand those studies correctly, the ones that indicate that crypto can't be used as a hedge against inflation simply find that when money is put into crypto as an investment, it does not generate a significant return on that investment above decrease in value due to inflation. This doesn't lead deductively to the conclusion that crypto doesn't play some causal role in inflation, I guess, but I was thinking that if we could blame crypto in some regard for the inflation crisis, some justifying evidence for that might be found in some correlation between the value of crypto holdings and the value of the dollar. But if they both change value at roughly the same rate, in roughly the same direction, with inflation, then that reduces my confidence in the claim that crypto is exerting an effect on inflation any more than the existence of the US dollar is, relative to the US economy. Of course, crypto could still affect rates of inflation somehow. As natalieironside suggests, economic actors might be evaluating crypto as a good investment and then investing and reinvesting into cryptocurrencies (to keep their value out of government-backed currencies) at a scale that spirals into the value of that (or those) government currency falling. But that still seems unlikely to be the case to me if cryptocurrencies that non-insiders would want to invest in (i.e. the ones that are more stable) are affected by inflation just like traditional currency. Especially since some of those more stable cryptos do, iirc, maintain that stability through some mechanism that responds to the value of the dollar? Again, though, I'm not a crypto or economic expert. I'm just curious about the possibilities of economic damage caused by crypto.

[natalieironside]

I was thinking more in terms of good money in competition with bad money. My suspicion is that dumping your assets into crypto has a similar economic effect to exchanging all your dollar bills for gold coins and burying them.

[eh-fandomtrash]

I would rather buy gold coins and bury them than buy any crypto. The internet is increasingly transient. People’s strange desire for a specific yellow metal has persisted for millennia.

Gimme the coins. They’ll be worth more in the long-term than digital numerals that exist on a delicate, breakable server somewhere.

[asphodelimago]

There's also the nontrivial effect that in the US, crypto (as an industry and as wealthy grifters) is being used to heavily influence elections. That certainly has a nontrivial but hard-to-quantify economic impact.

(Not least because the candidates who are anti-crypto are also typically in favor of broader progressive economic reform.)

[theragamuffininitiative]

Alright I want to know something here:

the 🙃 emoji means (approximately)

silly!*

ugh!*

secret third thing you will explain in tags*

Voting ended onJul 10

*if comfortable doing so, you may include your age range/generation in the tags for helpful demographic data

kindly reblog for bigger sample size, thanks!

[purronronner]

[faulsimon]

how do you feel about your hometown

love it/never wanna leave (still live there)

mid/whatever (still live there)

hate it (still live there)

love it/miss it (don't live there)

mid/whatever (don't live there)

hate it/good riddance (don't live there)

im bald

Voting ended onJul 15

saw a post that made me wonder this. please tag with your thoughts im curious!!

[reagan-slayer69]

“but what if you abort the baby who’ll cure cancer?!” sir the baby who will cure cancer is an organic chemistry major who works at a Home Depot because you use AI to go through your resumes

[mel-155-a]

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

[quasi-normalcy]

I think people who worship the past are among the least equipped to actually study it academically. Like you can say, "Ooh, I think Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived!" and it's just like, okay, well, cool, but you can't really formulate any interesting research questions on that basis.

[quasi-normalcy]

There's an entire cadre of people who bang on about "Enlightenment Values" and another (somewhat overlapping) cadre of people who have Grecian bust userpics, and they're united in being, by nature, the suckiest philosophers in the world and having never actually read any philosophy. It's a brand identity for them.

[asphodelimago]

Just putting it out into the world: Why ship the two human men when you could ship the sassy rock alien and the eldritch blood god.

They've both been alone and trapped with their survivor's guilt!

Burned by the crucible of inhospitable atmospheres, the very technology that brings them vision and hope also threatening doom!

Brilliant engineers, holding their missions together through duct tape and force of will!

Bound by the indomitable will to live and once again connect with other living beings!

Really weird leviathan/rock xeno, come on, I believe in you, Tumblr.

[captain-price-returns]

[quasi-normalcy]

I don't understand how this is even a defence in the age of drone warfare.

[graham-folger]

Or even like... Cannon warfare.

[quasi-normalcy]

Yeah, the Ottomans could have taken this in the fourteenth century.

[the-haiku-bot]

Yeah, the Ottomans

could have taken this in the

fourteenth century.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#ok but this wouldve popped off in the age of zombie doomsday prepping

ngl it would be a fantastic larp location.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#why do people think shipping containers are the cure to every issue????#unless youre filling them with sand theyre not bulletproof#and theres no fucken roof

Fill the shipping containers with concrete to make Giant Bricks

[darkenedyeastextract]

shipping containers are also not that strong and also only cheap/relatively accessible to use if you live somewhere where shipping containers just end up

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Fun fact about shipping container houses is that because so many shipping containers are used to transport hazardous materials and are unsuitable to live in for contamination reasons, it's often easier to make them out of entirely new, unused shipping containers than to source appropriate second hand ones. Which destroys the entire purpose of shipping container houses. Because we already know how to make rooms that are cheaper, better insulated, and more spacious and easy to acquire and transport than brand new shipping containers.

[darkenedyeastextract]

I remember a guy on one job talking about having one for storage on his property from ages back and the council was on his ass to remove it, costing him thousands. When the craze hit he had people come out of the wood work offering *him* 1000’s of dollars to buy it off him. He sold it for like 5k and his buy paid for all transport. Near overnight inversion of value for the things. Literally the best covert marketing campaign of lying which preyed on apocalypse anxiety (i am including solarpunk-esque people in this alongside preppers). Concrete is either too woke or not progressive enough for the average joe.

[asphodelimago]

Can we talk about how stupid and annoying grocery deliveries must be to that "compound"? Like yeah, just walk 300 feet or something with each pair of bags, nbd, hope your four trucks are just compensating for something and not because you have more than one person's worth of food to carry around.